There’s a proper orientation to the human body. Imagine if instead of your arms coming out of your shoulders, they extended from your waist, or if your legs grew from your back. Like us, bacteria also have an appropriate orientation and appendages involved in movement have a ‘correct’ place to be assembled. A recent paper from the Burrows Lab at McMaster University by Carter et al. in mBio investigated how an appendage called a type IV pilus (or T4P) is recruited to the cell poles. I’ll give the gist of the paper here, but for a full appreciation of it, read the paper here! Continue reading “Recruitment of a bacterial cell surface appendage to the cell pole”

I’m a little late on this, but with the end of 2016, it’s always fun to look back on the year that was for some introspection.

2016 – the year in review

2016 was a bit of a challenging year. I went into it hoping to finish my PhD, but at the time, was still working to push out my first publication. I’d say one of the biggest challenges I faced all year was trying to find motivation in the lab to keep pushing when things felt bleak. I managed to do it, and at the end of the day it worked out – I pushed through to get a publication out , and by the end of the year, defended my PhD Thesis. Continue reading “Goodbye 2016, hello 2017”

It’s lab journal club day tomorrow! So in honor of that, I’ll take it as a chance to work on writing general summaries of papers. SciComm! -Ryan

By now, you’ve probably heard that antimicrobial resistance is a major clinical problem. The ‘golden age’ of antimicrobials is coming to an end as the existing repertoire of clinically used antibiotics is becoming less effective and more bacteria are becoming resistant to common antibiotics. Resistance typically arises through ‘target mutation’ (modifying the target of an antibiotic inside the cell), preventing entry of the antibiotic altogether, or directly degrading or modifying the antibiotic so it’s no longer active.

Genes associated with antibiotic resistance are often found on plasmids, circular pieces of DNA that are distinct from the bacterial chromosome. Plasmids are small compared to chromosomal DNA – on the scale of 1000s of base pairs rather than millions. The amount of a plasmid within a single cell, referred to as a plasmid’s ‘copy number’, can vary from one to hundreds of copies. Continue reading “Evolution of antibiotic resistance through multicopy plasmids”

In one of my high school English classes, our teacher had everyone keep a journal. Usually once a week, the first 7-10 minutes of class was to write something. What we wrote never mattered, we just had to get sentences on paper. Our teacher encouraged the idea of writing for fun – getting pen (or at the time, HB pencil) to paper and writing what was on our mind. Of course, what came out was often unorganized, all over the place, and often grammatically incorrect. But it was fun. An outlet for creativity. Continue reading “‘Just Write’”

About this blog

Cell Culture is a science blog focused on two different but connected parts of science: (1) The findings (the stuff that gets published in scientific journals and sometimes mainstream media) and (2) the graduate students behind the research, and the issues they face.